Share Your iTunes Library Between Computers

For quite a long time, I was trying to manage two iTunes music libraries; one at work and one at home. I listen to music probably 7 out of 8 hours a day at work, but fairly rarely at home. But when I did listen at home, I didn’t have the same playlists I had at work, since many of them are dynamic, based on play counts and ratings.

I found a remedy a month or so ago, and now I can listen to the same library at work and at home. It works wonderfully.

To make this work for yourself, you’ll need an external hard drive or some other form of portable storage. A USB thumb/pen/flash drive would work, if you have a small collection. I’m using a 160GB hard drive I’d purchased for my laptop. It’s not an external drive, but I purchased an enclosure for it. The great thing about this setup is that it doesn’t need a separate power supply; it receives enough power through the USB connection so there’s no need to carry around a bulky AC adapter. This makes it much more portable. The enclosure came with a carry pouch, so I can easily carry the hard drive and USB cable with me between home and work.

I digress.

Start off on the computer that has the library you want to use. If one library is more developed than the other, you’ll obviously want to use the more developed one.

1. First of all, move your music files onto your portable storage device. The read/write speed on an external hard drive is plenty fast enough, so if you’re worried about choppy playback, you needn’t fret. It doesn’t matter what drive letter your external drive comes up as, but it does need to remain constant every time you connect it. You may want to change it to something further down the alphabet so there’s no chance that other portable media will steal that letter. The drive letter does not need to be the same between computers, however; they can be different. For instance, it could be the K: drive on your work computer and the P: drive at home; as long as it’s always K: at work and always P: at home, you’ll be fine.
2. Once you get your music copied over, you’ll want to copy your iTunes library onto your external hard drive. It can be found in the iTunes folder in My Music (C:Documents and Settings(your username)My DocumentsMy MusiciTunes). Copy iTunes Library.itl and iTunes Music Library.xml over to your external hard drive, preferrably in their own separate folder.
3. Now that your music and library files are copied over, you can configure iTunes to use these files instead of the defaults. To do this in Windows, hold the [Shift] key while double-clicking the iTunes icon to launch it; In OS-X, hold down the Option key while launching iTunes. A window will come up asking you to specify a library. Click the “Choose Library…” button. Browse to where you saved your library onto your external hard drive and select it. iTunes will now use this library file instead of the one saved in your My Music folder.
4. The final thing you’ll want to do is change the iTunes Music folder location. To do this, go into the Settings within iTunes and click on the “Advanced” tab. Change the folder location to wherever it is on your external hard drive.

The first computer is set up.

On the second computer, all you have to do is follow steps 3 & 4 above. That’s it! You now have two computers sharing the same library, same play counts, same ratings, and same playlists! And the beauty of this setup is that you can import music on either computer and instantly have access to it on the other!

I haven’t tried it on more than two machines, but I don’t see any reason why you couldn’t do this on three, four, or as many computers as you want. Keep in mind, however, that this is not a media server. As far as I know, you can’t share out the library files to use on multiple computers simultaneously. This is a one-at-a-time setup. It’s designed for going back and forth from home/work, or perhaps if you’re going to be using an unfamiliar computer for a period of time.

Tagged as: itunes, music, tutorial